Narrator Paul Nugent's conversational delivery turns Tana French's stand-alone mystery into a painstaking confession over pints at a pub. Nugent's earnest tone makes the privileged and oblivious Toby seem charming as the story dives into the ripple effect of becoming a crime victim. After suffering a severe head injury from a brutal burglary, Toby stays with his ailing uncle in the ivy-covered family home. When a skull is discovered in the witch elm in the backyard, Toby begins to question his cheery memories of his youth and his relationship with his cousins. Nugent's myriad character voices sound authentic, keeping the listener locked inside Toby's head. French's faithful listeners will recognize the Dublin detectives who become involved, with Mike Rafferty taking the lead in the ivy house case.
Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
Duration: 22 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781984837998
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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